When the Tutor Spoke to Me in Marathi

My problem was never science. My problem was that science kept arriving in a language I had to translate first.

Half my materials, the good ones, were in English. At home we speak Marathi. So every concept reached me through a fog — I'd spend my energy decoding the *words* and have nothing left for the *idea*. By the time I'd worked out what a sentence said, the meaning had slipped past me. I wasn't slow at science. I was fast at science and slow at English, and school couldn't tell the difference.

The first time I asked the Abhigyaan tutor a question, I asked it in Marathi, half-expecting it to not understand or to answer in English anyway. It answered me in Marathi. Clear, natural Marathi. My language.

I can't fully explain what that did. The fog just — lifted. For the first time, a concept came to me directly, with nothing in between. I understood the idea *as an idea*, not as a translation problem to solve first. I asked follow-ups, in Marathi, and it kept up with me, and we went deep into things I'd been too tangled up to reach before.

It turns out I had a lot of questions. They'd just been trapped behind a language I wasn't fluent enough to ask them in.

My teacher noticed within weeks. She said my conceptual answers had become much stronger — that I clearly understood the *why*, even when my English wrote it clumsily. That was exactly it. The understanding had always been possible. The understanding had just been waiting for someone to speak to me in the language I think in.

I'm getting better at English too, slowly, because now I learn the concept first in Marathi and attach the English words after — which is so much easier than trying to do both at once. But that first moment, the tutor answering me in my own language, like it was the most natural thing in the world — that's when school stopped feeling like it was built for someone else.